A Last Throw of The Dice - chapters 3 & 4 of The Honesty Pot

Chapter Three

A Last Throw of The Dice

Once mOre June summOned her team, her trusty trio of builder, surveyor and valuer.and this time they had to act fast. We had viewed the property on a monday, andtenders had to be in by Friday. What was more we were off to London on the ursdayevening, so ursday 5pm became our deadline. June didn’t need precise, writtenestimates, but she did need a reliable guide and a sensible price. is house would bethe bridge to her future; and she needed to know if that bridge would carry her weight.andy cook, andrew Beard and mike mather were down there the very next morning.

June had only vague ideas of how the building might work as a whole: whatmattered was the room on the first floor. is was the deal-breaker. Its size was impor-tant; and she could see 50 people seated comfortably there. But more than that, shecould see herself working happily in it for years to come. It was the room she’d beenlooking for. One by one the reports came in. andrew said that the roof needed workand the back of the basement was a mess, but that the building was otherwise sound.e property was five floors high though, and would take a lot of decorating. and ofcourse planning consent would be needed for change of use. June made frantic calcu-lations. What was it worth? mike’s estimate was around £230,000. at le her verylittle room for manœuvre. But, encouragingly, a call to the planning departmentsuggested that her intentions were broadly in line with their plans for the area.

With the clock ticking down, June contacted the bank. a loan would depend uponplanning consent; and consent could take eight months to grant. Business plans prolif-erated. cash-flow forecasts multiplied. ere were so many variables: so manyunknowns to boil down to firm, hard figures. she had to go for it though, and she hadto give it her very best shot. is, she felt, was her last chance. she had spent £35,000or more chasing her dream: on surveys and loans, selling and moving, renting andstoring. If this bid went the way of the previous two, then that was it. she would buy alittle house with a garden, and bury her ‘calling’ for good. as the deadline approached,she made up her mind. £231,000 was her bid: a fraction above mike’s estimate, but stillabout £5,000 more than she could easily find. We dropped it in to the estate agent’soffice and set off up to London.

But what was it June was looking for? What exactly was she in search of? at thetime I thought I knew. she wanted a place of her own to run courses in: a beautiful

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environment that would help individuals to grow. her years in training and consul-tancy had proved to her that everyone has a capacity for creativity and self-fulfillment.But she’d also observed the barriers that the world puts in their way, the hoops andhurdles. and the barriers that hampered her own work most were the bleak, institu-tional training rooms she so oen had to use. ey lowered the spirits and drainedaway the energy. Years of hard chairs, strip lighting and poor coffee had convinced herthat our potential to shine is strongly influenced by our environment.

is dissatisfaction had then been sharpened into a sense of mission in australia.e general culture of can do, and the feeling of being marked out by her aboriginaladoption, had given this feeling shape and direction. Initially I thought this was justJune. however quixotic it seemed, this was what ‘Junes’ did: they spent their timeviewing old buildings and dreaming of training centres. But as I heard more aboutaustralia, and as her ‘calling’ led us further off the beaten track, I began to realize therewas more to it. If all of us have the potential to do great things, then June was different,if nothing else, in her refusal to let that potential languish, unused. her calling musthave very deep roots, because it not only mobilized a formidable array of talents, butit wouldn’t take no for an answer. is was not a passing whim. It was an urgent imper-ative that drew on everything she’d learned to date, and demanded that she put it onthe line. and she ignored it at her peril. It offered her the chance to explore her fullpotential, but it threatened to cast a long, dark shadow, if she turned the offer down.is centre was clearly more than just a business venture.

so the stakes were high with Portland square. she knew she could make it work;but she’d played every card in her hand, and had nothing le up her sleeve. she’dsubmitted her bid and could do no more. It was good to get away to London. my twinsister was in a play called Feel Good – and June had a contract that filled the mondayand tuesday. she buried herself in work. When she got back to Bristol though, therewas news for her: good news. her bid had succeeded. e long search was over! shewas jubilant. she was delighted, relieved, and more than a little scared. she’d got whatshe wanted; but had her instincts been right? What had seemed like journey’s end wasin fact just the start of things! Well, there was no going back now. e purchase was inmotion, and there was no time to wonder. ey would exchange as soon as possible,and complete when planning consent came through in October. at last the phase ofpaper plans was over, and things could get concrete. June got onto the bank. she liaisedwith andy cook and with architect Jeff Webber. she contacted the council. she sentquestions to the vendor. But as the days went by, doubts began to form. had sheoverstretched herself? Where would that extra £5,000 come from?

two weeks crawled by with no word from the vendor. We tried to get on with life.We worked, ate and slept. We tried not to fret. But somewhere deep down we wereholding our breath. June remembered her first glimpse of Portland square, decadesbefore. she had just started at the Bristol Old Vic; and her asm was taking her for aspin in her sports car, to show her the sights. e wedding cake church was a landmark

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of note; and as they swept round the square towards it, June turned to her colleague,and said what a lovely place this would be to live. at was 25 years ago; but was thatinnocent wish about to come true? We were in Wales for the weekend, at my familyhome: and by now June was on tenterhooks. no news was bad news. What had gonewrong? had someone gazumped her? e estate agent was a commercial one, and wasclosed on weekends. But as we drove back on monday, June could stand it no longer.is was before mobile phones, and public call boxes were scarce in mid-Wales. Wecounted our change, and kept our eyes peeled. at last in Llandovery, we spotted aphone box; and June le a message. We stopped again in Brecon, and she le another,trying not to sound desperate now. We arrived back in Bristol to find a message on heranswerphone: would she ring in the morning?

aer a night of restless foreboding, June picked up the phone. “We still want toaccept your offer...” said the agent. June braced herself for a ‘but’. “But we’d like toexpedite things. We don’t want to wait till October. my client would like to completein June.” she explained that the bank wouldn’t release her loan until planning had comethrough. “Well,” he said with some finality, “that’s the position, I’m afraid.” June saidshe would contact her bank, and see if they would change the agreement; but if theywouldn’t, there was nothing she could do: her hands were tied. and with that, theconversation ended. With her heart in her mouth, she picked up the phone to the bank.

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Portland Square before restoration of railings

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again she seemed to be at the mercy of a system over which she had no control.however much she wanted this property, she was powerless if the bank said no. sheexplained the situation, and waited – and the bank said Yes! ey would loan herenough to buy the building, they said, but not a penny of the refurbishment budgetuntil planning consent was granted. an empty shell is no use, she thought: what ifconsent doesn’t come through?! she rang her advisers. One of them had news. he’dheard on the grapevine that her bid was £10,000 above the next highest. ere wasroom for manœuvre. she should ring the estate agent and ask him: “In the light ofthese new circumstances, what price does your vendor now have in mind?” ey hadmoved the goalposts, and they should therefore be prepared to negotiate.

June copied the sentence down word for word, and nervously picked up the phone.she wasn’t used to this sort of poker game. e agent answered; and she launched intoher script. “…what price does your vendor now have in mind?” Without a beat, withouta pause for thought, the response came back: “£227,000”. she asked him to repeat it.he did so; and she gulped. at a stroke the missing £5,000 was all but wiped away. shesuspected she should negotiate, but she didn’t. she just blurted out, “Yes”. every doubtwas now resolved. e path ahead was suddenly clear. aer all the instinctual prompt-ings – aer all the messages from within – she felt at last that the outside world, thatthe universe itself was giving her the thumbs-up. a great big unequivocal Yes. It was


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another of those messages, telling her she was on the right road. and if that was thecase, it was hard to imagine that planning consent, already agreed in principle, wouldbe much of a problem. she would do whatever she had to, of course, but consent wouldeventually be granted. and since the refurbishment budget would follow from that,she could go full steam ahead with the purchase. e tide had turned and was nowflowing her way. e bank duly agreed to the arrangement; and, because they kept theloan at the sum asked for in the original tender, the shortfall of £1000 was taken careof too. robert cooper, for many years June’s accountant and close friend, describedthis process in disbelief as ‘anti-gazumping’. It was a phenomenon he’d never comeacross before.

ree months of bubbling excitement ensued. June had got what she wanted, atraining room of the right dimensions – but with it came a five-storey Grade I Georgiantown house. is had not been part of her australian vision. Planning and researchwould be needed. In between instructing solicitors, chasing surveyors and contactingcity council and english heritage, she began to look around. she discovered anevening class on Georgian architecture, run by artist and historian Janet margrie; andshe visited the second-hand bookshop down the lane from her temporary flat. ereshe found several volumes on Georgian buildings, and settled down to read about whatshe was buying, and how she should treat it.

June’s researches were forward-looking, mine meanwhile burrowed back in time. Ifound Portland square in 2001 slightly challenging, but I leapt at the chance to excavatethe square’s roots. I buried my nose in directories and old census returns. Who hadlived in this historic building? We knew from the deeds that 1792 was the date workhad started, but the first occupant, William daniel, didn’t move in until 1802. e waragainst the French republic, it seems, and then against napoleon, had caused abanking crash in 1793 that had bankrupted the builders. e census doesn’t start until

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27 Portland Square as the

Scouts HQ circa 1946


1841, and the earlier directories are frustratingly vague about street numbers. so Iended up with dozens of names living somewhere in the square, and had to dig muchmore widely to find their addresses.

a partial but fascinating picture emerged. ere were the usual happy accidents:in 1841 the starch merchants, omas and henry stiff lived at no. 19, with a Professorof Botany, samuel rootsey at no. 25. It began to feel like a soap opera or a four-dimen-sional board game. a cast of colourful characters distributed round a square of 34houses, layer aer layer across 200 years. In 1841 the household at no. 27 comprisedJohn Keene and his wife, three children, his mother-in-law and three servants. But by1850 the Keenes have gone, to be replaced by maltster William Baker with his wifesarah ann, five sons, two daughters, one mother-in-law and three servants. It’s theonly Grade I listed square in Bristol, and clearly in its heyday was a sought aer address.e actress ellen terry used to visit in the 1860s, calling on her future lover at no. 21,the designer edward Godwin. But by the 1870s its cachet was sliding. In 1876 no. 27became a manufactory of hats and caps; and apart from a brief spell from 1946 to 1952,it wouldn’t be a residence again until a certain June Burrough took it on in 2001. Iwarmed to the building. Indeed I found myself more and more excited, as I picturedJune stepping boldly into the pages of history.


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inside the Chrysalis

June cOmPLeted On FrIdaY 8 June, and moved into 27 Portland square the very nextday. It was a barely habitable shell; but the budget was tight, and she couldn’t afford torent the flat or pay for storage a single day longer. In spite of her continuing incomefrom consultancy contracts, she knew that the next twelve months would be a balanc-ing act, and that every penny would count. But she’d spent years as a stage manager,eking out small budgets; and the challenge didn’t daunt her in the slightest.

It was an extraordinary sensation, the silence that fell when the busy months ofhunting and hoping came to an end, and the front door closed behind us. success.completion. We had arrived! But the vast, empty building seemed to be holding itsbreath. apart from the slow settlement of dust, time seemed to have stopped. Wewalked through room aer room, on floor aer floor. e building was waiting andwatching: withholding its blessing until it saw what June’s intentions were. her plansmust have come as a shock. no. 27 had scarcely been residential for 125 years; andJune planned to live there. a scout master had occupied the top floor from 1946 to1952 – setting fire to the chimney while he was there – but the building was low oncreature comforts. It boasted a total of seven toilets, but no kitchen and no bathroom:nothing to make it a home. Luckily there was no rush at this stage. major work couldn’tbegin unless, or until, June secured planning permission; and that would take severalmonths. she could get used to the building. she could get to know its character; andfigure out how to survive with no hot water and no hot food. she had time to explore.

It was as though June had come across a great dinosaur fossil stretched out on thetundra. all the bones, every tarsal and vertebra were there; but they were dusty andlifeless and scattered around. each one needed cleaning. ey needed gathering andordering, and putting back together. In time June would give this brontosaurus a heart,an intelligence, and a nervous system to animate its big body. she’d even put a smileon its face, and teach the great creature to dance. But for now she was simply countingthe bones, and deciding where best to begin. she would sit for hours, asking each roomwhat it wanted her to do; and listening for its response. she was beginning to love theplace back to its original splendour; and visualising how it would look when therenovations were complete.

a bedroom seemed a good idea; so, with brushes and rollers, we made our way up

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to the very top floor. e big room on the back was the one chosen to be June’sbedroom; but there was work needed there, and we tackled instead one of the smallerrooms on the front. is had been a maid’s room 200 hundred years before, low-ceilinged and therefore, we thought, quite quick to paint. It took forever! We were at itfor hour aer hour; and slowly we realized that even the smallest of the rooms wasreally quite a size. When the paint finally dried, June moved her bed and belongingsin, and made herself at home. It was a huge bedroom! temporary perhaps, but cosyenough. But she was woken that night by a noise like the severn in spate. she got upand poked around, and found that the wooden boxing that ran by her bed seemed tohave a river inside it. an open lead gutter was channelling a torrent of rain water pasther right ear. e Georgian developers had refused to allow downpipes to spoil thefaçade of their square, and instead had sent rain water from the parapet gutter, backthrough the maid’s room, and away down the internal plumbing. Bit by bit June wasgetting to know her new home.

at top landing is dominated by what architects call a conical lantern. It’s a skylightshaped like a wigwam: spilling sun-, moon- and starlight down the cantilevered stair-case that spirals up towards it. running round its circular base is a frieze of plasterfruit-baskets, strangely intimate because of the low ceiling. e simply modelledbaskets give a domestic, almost bucolic feel to what would have been chiefly the realm

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An early discovery behind the boarded up

bathroom fireplace



of the maidservants. It’s a very happy place to reach aer climbing so many dizzyingflights of stairs. You can, in fact, climb one level further: there’s a flat roof above, setbetween two pitched roofs, and accessed by a door on the landing and a narrow,wooden staircase. Peering over the pitched roofs gives you views of the rooops,treetops and steeples of Bristol that make you feel like a cabin-boy in the crow’s-nest,or indeed like the bird itself.

Below our feet lay five floors of history. much of the decoration was actually decadesout of date when work started in 1792: nearer George I than George III. e fruitbaskets, for example, probably came from moulds that the plasterer had inherited fromhis grandfather. e developers had set up building covenants to dictate the appearanceof the freestone facades, and to ensure a consistent look to the square. But behind thefront doors, things were le to local crasmen; and the results were far from what Johnnash was unveiling in London. But throughout the building, on every floor, there werehappy features, unconstrained by fashion, and drawing on a repertoire of taste fromacross the Georgian era.

ese features had survived; but many of them, unfortunately, were masked ormarred by 20th century accretions. On the floor below, the coving of the main frontroom had been cut by a partitioned booth, built into the room. Below that, on the firstfloor, the generous expanse of the landing had been interrupted by another partitionwall. e front room on the ground floor, the morning room, had computer cablescrudely smashed through its ornate cornice. and the Library had had heavy iron barsfitted over its beautiful arched window, defending it from the back courtyard, butcrushing its buoyant spirit. even in the basement, the bread oven was buried behindstock-keeping shelves, and the domed store-rooms at the back had mysteriously beenrobbed of light and meaning. Beautiful fireplaces on almost every floor had beenboarded up and hidden from sight. so the dinosaur bones were there: but they neededplenty of care and attention. and though the prospect would have daunted mostpeople, June seemed to greet it with relish.

In 1876 the lace maker henry makepeace sold his home at no. 27 to Pearce Broth-ers, who turned it over to the manufacture of headwear. One by one, the 34 houses ofthe square were becoming business premises, with residents reduced in the main toapprentices lodged above their workshops. In 1915, as the Great War raged, the BristolBoy scouts arrived in no. 27, fostering a spirit of service, knots and self-reliance forthe next 18 years. among their number was a young archie Leach, later to cross theatlantic and make his name as cary Grant. But in 1933 a firm called english corru-gating Paper, patentees of the corrugated cardboard box, expanded from their twoexisting premises next door at no. 28 and at no. 25, and purchased no. 27. a Jamesmardon had founded the firm in 1820; and it was from his descendent, chris mardon,that June bought the building. e scouts remained for a while as tenants, but englishcorrugating used most of the building for their offices. ey had been forced out of

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no. 25 by wartime bombing, and had moved their machines round the corner to afactory in Orange street; but nos. 27 and 28 stayed in their hands for the remainderof the century. miraculously the Luwaffe had spared, or rather missed, no. 27 and itstwo neighbours; but nos. 22–25 were destroyed, and nos. 29–31 remain a bomb-siteto this day. e church was damaged by bombs, and forty four people were killedaround the corner in dean street. Over the years, english corrugating had knockedconnecting doors through from no. 28 to no. 27: the former being a site of productionand the latter housing their administration. ese sealed-up, vestigial doorways werestill visible in a couple of places, marking a tide of history that had flowed and thenebbed.

english corrugating’s long tenure had protected the building from the worst of thelast century’s “improving” tendencies, but the place was still full of office furniture andother effects. and June could tackle this at once: it was not something that had to waitfor consent. most of it was not worth keeping. ere was room aer room of desksand old filing cabinets, virtually all of which could be let go. But there were items thatpleaded successfully to stay on board. two oak desks, a bit tight on the knees, but well-made and serviceable, stayed with us. a big square plan chest, with drawers that wentback for ever, adamantly refused to budge, and was installed very usefully in themorning room. and a boardroom table, vast and solid, made the journey up anddown the stairs half a dozen times, before settling into what would be June’s kitchen.It became the platform for many a meal and meeting, and would eventually followJune when she came to leave the building.

a real and rather magnificent headache were the safes. ere were three of them:God knows how old, but they were massive steel boxes that looked built to withstandJesse James and several sticks of dynamite. e problem was their weight. We couldn’timagine how they’d arrived there, but the three firms that June contacted said therewas a serious risk of them bringing the entire staircase down if that route were tried.One firm did some measurements though and thought they might be able to “fly” thesafes out of the window. June went for it. e biggest of them sat in the front room onthe first floor, as uncompromising as a sumo wrestler. e other two were immediatelyabove, but you wouldn’t have seen them if you’d walked into that second floor room.all you saw as you entered was chris mardon’s desk, the shelves in the alcoves, and arather nondescript picture on the partition wall. e hilarious thing was that thepicture was hinged, and would swing back to reveal the door to one of the safes,installed in the booth behind the partition. You felt you’d wandered onto the set of anealing comedy. at safe sat on top of another one, accessible only from within thetop secret booth.

It was these two beasts that the contractors began with. an early start was essentialbefore a single car disturbed the square. ey parked a flat-bed truck in front of thebuilding, and another beside it with a mammoth crane. up on the second floor theywere calmness itself. With a de use of levers and rollers, they had the safes pirouetting


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around, out of the partition, into the room proper, and up a ramp to the lip of thewindow. egyptian pharaohs would have gasped in admiration and begged them tobuild pyramids for them. It was highly impressive. straps were wrapped under the firstof the safes and attached to the hook of the crane. It was only at this moment, with thedestructive weight of the safe now balanced on the edge, that faint signs of tensioncould be seen. however unruffled and well-rehearsed things had seemed so far, clearlythis was a step into the unknown. ey looked at each other. e foreman swallowed,checked the straps, and called down to the crane driver. e safe edged further outinto the thin morning air. e tension built – and then the tipping point came, andthe safe was suddenly swinging free, its huge weight supported only by the straps. ecrane made a rapid move , and I could see what they’d been fearing. eir nightmarehad been to watch the safe turn into a wrecking ball and slam back into the building.

slowly it was lowered down onto the flat-bed; and upstairs the men manœuvredthe second safe up onto the ramp. I grabbed a camera and raced downstairs. I wantedto catch a groundling’s view of that extraordinary moment when the safe forsook alifetime of gravity and took to its wings: when an elephant flew! I’d seen the back-stagepreparations, now I wanted to catch the performance. and it was worth it. It was likesome primeval dentist extracting a giant’s tooth and waving it about in the air. Wecould have sold tickets for the show! e contractors had started with the second floorsafes so that they could refine their technique before tackling the monster on the firstfloor. We had an extra challenge for them there. June was reluctant to lose thesetimeless giants, and in fact had found a home for one at the tobacco Factory in southBristol. But the biggest of them she wanted to keep. she wanted it lowered on downbelow ground level into the front courtyard, and then rolled into the depths of thecupboard that curled under the stairs. and there indeed it ended, squatting like somebenign goblin at the root of the building; and I imagine its flying days are done for theforeseeable future. Well before 9am, a jubilant but exhausted crew were sitting aroundJune’s kitchen table, tucking into breakfast – job done and contract completed.

In the Old Kitchen, through which the great safe had trundled, there was a forestof shelving. at was dismantled and hauled away, as was the shed in the rancid backcourtyard. It was a phase of stripping back and laying bare. e course of this wholeyear was a form of pupation, the radical transitions that go on inside a chrysalis. ebuilding would close its doors; and behind them the shabby, glum grub that June inher-ited would be transformed into a butterfly. is involved a breaking down andre-ordering of molecules: especially apparent when scaffolding went up over the entirefrontage, and floorboards everywhere were le up for weeks at a time. But for June thiswas a creative period. aer such a long time of planning, she could at last work withthe walls and windows of a building, to make real what her “calling” had been whisper-ing for so long.

she had a name for the building: she’d decided on it three weeks before the placewas hers. But it wasn’t her first choice. her first impulse had been to call it the anahata

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centre. In sanskrit the anahata chakra is the heart chakra, associated with compas-sion, charity, healing and global love: everything she wanted the centre to stand for. Iand other friends and colleagues groaned. It sounded too new agey. It sounded thekind of place you’d go if you had little bells tied in your hair. did she not want ‘corpo-rate’ clients? she growled and scowled, and went muttering back to the drawing board.We were once again in West Wales that weekend, and she was casting hungrily aroundfor inspiration. a learning environment was what she was planning. Our surroundingsoffered plenty of trees and rocks and late spring flowers, but not much in the concep-tual line. But in a bookshop in aberystwyth, she fell upon a dictionary of quotations,and emerged triumphantly with alexander Pope’s lines: “a little learning is a dangerousthing: drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring!” e words had familiarity andauthority, seasoned with a faint sense of mystery. But what and where was the Pierianspring? e bookshop was silent on that question.

In those innocent pre-Google days, research was a long and stoney road. e cardi-ganshire house held few volumes beyond my grandfather’s matching edition of theWorks of the Welsh Poets (in their native tongue). so June phoned her parents, whoseshelves, she knew, were bowed and burdened with reference books. north norfolk


The safe leaving the premises

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A Last Throw of The Dice - chapters 3 & 4 of The Honesty Pot

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Transcript of A Last Throw of The Dice - chapters 3 & 4 of The Honesty Pot